Just A Little Shady's Season 5 Pop-Up at Mom's Spaghetti: I Drove Four Hours to Detroit and Met Hailie Jade and Brittany Ednie

On Friday, August 14, 2026, Just A Little Shady took over Mom's Spaghetti on Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit to launch Season 5. I found out with almost no warning, drove four hours from Niagara, and ended up meeting both hosts, Hailie Jade and Brittany Ednie, plus an unplanned bonus in Hailie's famously private husband Evan McClintock. This is the full account, with my own photos and video from the day, plus the verified details on what the pop-up was and how to go yourself.

Some trips you plan for a month. This one existed for about as long as it took to read a listings post and put gas in the car.

Daily Detroit ran a short line in its weekend roundup on Thursday: the Just A Little Shady podcast was popping up at Mom's Spaghetti in downtown Detroit when it opened the next morning at 11 a.m., celebrating the start of the show's fifth season, with the first episode dropping that afternoon. Hailie and the podcast crew would be there meeting listeners.

That was the entire announcement. No ticket link, no RSVP, no queue system. Just a time, a place, and the implication that Eminem's daughter was going to be standing in a spaghetti restaurant on Woodward on a Friday.

I left Niagara at 5 a.m. and was in line by 10, an hour before the doors opened.

What the pop-up actually was

Here are the confirmed facts:

• Date and time: Friday, August 14, 2026, from the 11 a.m. open.
• Location: Mom's Spaghetti, 2131 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48201, inside the Union Assembly space in The District Detroit.
• Occasion: the launch of Season 5 of the Just A Little Shady podcast.
• Who was actually there: Hailie, Brittany and Evan. Three people.
• The episode: "Consider This Your Official Invitation - Ep. 1" dropped that same afternoon. Season 5, Episode 1, running 44 minutes and 58 seconds.

One correction to the preview, since I was standing in it. "Hailie and the podcast crew" oversells it by some distance. There was no crew. It was Hailie, Brittany and Evan, and that was the entire operation. The merch was on racks upstairs in The Trailer, which is also where the meet and greet happened.

Not a concert, not a signing with a rope line, not an Eminem appearance. A podcast launching a season in the restaurant her dad owns a piece of, in the city both of them are from. The scale of it is the point.

The four-hour version of a good idea

The drive from Niagara to Detroit is about four hours if the border behaves. Mine did not, quite. Going in I was asked to shut the engine off and hand over the key, and the trunk was gone through before I was waved on. Then Michigan, and the road.

I brought my 13-year-old nephew, who has been needing a day out of the house more than he has been letting on, and who had never seen Detroit or Mom's Spaghetti before. Watching a 13-year-old take in Woodward Avenue for the first time is its own small reward, and I will leave it at that.

Meeting Brendan from STANS

I linked up with Brendan, who is Stan #3 in STANS, the Eminem documentary. He confirmed the billing to me himself, which is worth saying because the published credits list the fans by first name only, so the numbering is not something you can look up. He is one of the small group of real fans whose stories carry the whole film, and it dates his fandom to 2008.

Quick refresher on the film, because the dates get muddled online. STANS premiered at the SXSW London Screen Festival on June 2, 2025, played a limited AMC theatrical run in the United States from August 7, 2025, and landed on Paramount+ on August 26, 2025. It was directed by Steven Leckart and produced by Antoine Fuqua, Eminem, Paul Rosenberg, Stuart Parr and Tony DiSanto, among others. It sits at 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 21 reviews.

The fans who stay with you are not the extreme cases. They are the people who found the records at exactly the moment the records were the only thing that made sense. We have a fuller breakdown in our piece on the STANS documentary and where fandom crosses the line.

The fans in the film were picked from a social media call that pulled in roughly 9,000 responses, with a questionnaire asking when you first heard Eminem, whether you would call yourself a stan, and whether you had ever been to Detroit. A handful came out the other end. So I asked Brendan the obvious question: how does someone end up in that group?

His answer was that for fifteen years he has been dropping everything and going to every Eminem event. Not the big ones. Every one. Shows, screenings, openings, pop-ups, whatever it is and wherever it is, he goes.

The film puts him in since 2008, which is eighteen years. The fifteen is when it stopped being something he listened to and became something he travelled for. No wonder he is Stan #3.

He also moderates r/eminem, which is the other half of the same job. One version of it is showing up in person. The other is keeping the room in order for everybody who cannot.

Here is the detail that sold it, though. On the Mom's Spaghetti grand opening day in September 2021, Brendan was seventh in line.

Check that against the record: Eminem served the first ten customers himself that day. Seventh in line means Brendan is one of the ten people Eminem handed a container of spaghetti to. He did not mention this as a flex. It came up because I asked him where the line formed.

Mom's Spaghetti, and the trailer above it

Mom's Spaghetti is not a novelty stunt that got out of hand. It started as pop-ups. In 2017, Eminem partnered with the Detroit-area restaurant group Union Joints to run a string of Mom's Spaghetti pop-ups promoting Revival, including one at The Shelter, the basement venue under Saint Andrew's Hall where the 8 Mile battles were shot. From there it travelled: Coachella in 2018, Firefly, Governors Ball. The permanent location opened at 2131 Woodward Avenue on September 29, 2021, and Eminem served the first ten customers himself.

Above the restaurant is The Trailer, a small shop named for B-Rabbit's trailer in 8 Mile. It sells Mom's Spaghetti merch and pieces from the Eminem retail collection, including limited editions and dead stock, and it keeps a rotating display of memorabilia from the Eminem archives. Wood panelling, green shag, the whole idea.

The memorabilia is the part people underrate. It is not a museum and it does not pretend to be, but the cases are genuinely good: a signed SHADY LANE sign with its authenticity plaque, a bottle of Godzilla Whiskey, the fictional brand Eminem drinks in the Cole Bennett-directed video from 2020, sitting with a 1xRUN certificate, and the program from the 37th Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on November 5, 2022, the night Dr. Dre inducted Eminem, beside a card for a Super Bowl LVI halftime performer's jacket. Those last two are both marked NFS. Stock rotates, so what is in the case one week may not be there the next.

Tap any of them to see the full frame.

The manager who has been there fourteen years

One of the best conversations of the day was with the manager at Mom's Spaghetti, who told me she has been with the operation for fourteen years and is friends with Hailie. She was completely unbothered by the whole thing, in the way that people who actually work somewhere always are while everyone around them is losing it.

One note, and it takes nothing away from her: the Woodward restaurant opened in 2021 and the pop-ups started in 2017, so fourteen years points back to the wider Union Joints family of Detroit restaurants this was built with rather than to this address. Which is the better story anyway. The people running the counter under the Slim Shady branding are career Detroit restaurant people, not a cast hired for the logo.

Seeing Hailie in the booth, and leaving her alone

Mom's Spaghetti shares its building with Union Assembly, the full sit-down restaurant it opened inside. At one point during the afternoon I walked through and there they were: Hailie and the group, in a booth, eating.

Not doing press. Not doing photos. Eating.

I did not go over. It was not a hard call. There is a version of fandom that treats any sighting as an opening, and there is a version that understands a booth in a restaurant is a booth in a restaurant. She had been on her feet for hours and was going to be back at it shortly.

The coolest part of the whole day was how normal it was. They are just there, in the city, having lunch like anybody else.

First in line, for the wrong line

This is the part I have to report against myself.

Brendan knew where a line at this building goes, because he had stood in one. For the grand opening it ran outside, along the corner of the building. So that is where I posted up, an hour before doors, and I was first. Being first in line is, at this point, a small habit. I was first at the STANS premiere too. Here is the wait:

My own footage. More clips from the day are going up on my YouTube channel.

Hailie turned up about thirty minutes late, which is a completely reasonable thing for a person to do and which I noted with the intensity of someone who had driven four hours. Then the arrival, all three of them walking in:

Hailie, Brittany and Evan walking in. That is the entire party, which is the point made above.

Then the realisation. People were queuing to see her upstairs, in The Trailer. That was the line. The one I was at the front of was the line to get into a restaurant. First in line again, and not first to meet Hailie.

The saving grace is that the real line was not bad at all. Roughly twenty to thirty minutes from joining it to standing in front of Hailie and Brit. For a same-day, no-ticket, no-RSVP thing with Eminem's daughter at the end of it, that is nothing.

Then I actually met them

Worth saying how unusual this is. Hailie is not a touring artist and does not do the meet-and-greet circuit. She is one of the most recognisable names in music by association and one of the least available in person. Fan photos of her, in a room, on an ordinary Friday, barely exist. That is the whole reason a one-line listings post was enough to put me in a car for four hours.

Brittany Ednie is not a hired co-host. She and Hailie have been friends since second grade, and the show has always run on that: two people who have known each other since childhood talking through their week. It is the reason a podcast with an enormous famous-dad asterisk on it has lasted five seasons without ever really being about him.

The autographs

I got Hailie's signature twice, in two different ways, and the second one is the better story.

The first was on a copy of The Eminem Show on vinyl, bought downstairs that same day and carried straight up. Buying the record and getting his daughter to sign it, in the shop above the restaurant named after his most quoted line, is about as neatly closed a loop as this fandom offers.

The second was a welcome card they were handing out, already pre-signed by Hailie. So I asked Brittany to sign it too. Half printed, half in person, and now the only version of that card with both hosts on it.

The one I did not expect: Evan

Evan was not part of this. He was not on the schedule, not in the listing, and not in the line. He was standing off to the side, about ten feet away, watching Hailie and Brit work through the fans.

Which is exactly what makes it. Evan McClintock, who married Hailie on May 18, 2024 at Greencrest Manor in Battle Creek, Michigan, is the least loud person in this entire story and appears to like it that way. His Instagram is private and stays that way. He has no public profile of his own, does not appear on the podcast, and has spent his whole time in the public eye politely declining to become a character in it.

If a photo with Hailie is rare, a photo with Evan is rarer. I only got one because I spotted him, and he was good about it. Nothing about the day promised him.

Hailie and Evan's son, Elliot Marshall McClintock, was born on March 14, 2025, which made Eminem a grandfather for the first time. The middle name is for Marshall Bruce Mathers III, and fans caught the initials immediately: E.M.M.

Part 2 is coming: the full conversation

I did not just get photos. I had a real conversation with all three of them, and it is too much to bolt onto the end of this piece. Part 2 will be the full conversation: what I asked, what they said, and the bits that surprised me.

The Season 5 premiere

The episode landed that afternoon, exactly as advertised. "Consider This Your Official Invitation - Ep. 1", Season 5, Episode 1, 44 minutes and 58 seconds, with Hailie and Brit catching up on everything that happened over the break and putting out a call for listener "Shady Stories."

Listening to it in the car that evening, a few hours after standing in the room it was launched in, is a specific kind of good. The show also runs on YouTube if you prefer to watch it.

Some background on the show for anyone new to it. Just A Little Shady launched in July 2022, hosted by Hailie with Brittany co-hosting, and the title is the obvious wink at her father's alter ego. It runs weekly in seasons, and Season 4 wrapped on May 15, 2026 with "A Millennial's Guide to Hot Girl Summer."

The songs underneath all of this

You cannot stand in that room and not think about the catalog. Hailie is the most referenced person in Eminem's discography, going back to her voice opening "My Dad's Gone Crazy" on The Eminem Show in 2002, when she was around six.

Then "Mockingbird" in 2004, still the clearest thing he ever recorded about what those years actually cost.

And then "Temporary," from The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), released July 12, 2024. The song is written to Hailie for after he is gone. The video, released October 3, 2024, is where the world found out she was pregnant, because that is where she hands him a Detroit Lions shirt with GRANDPA on the back and then a sonogram.

Twenty-two years separate the kid on "My Dad's Gone Crazy" from the woman handing her father a sonogram in a music video, and roughly two more from a Friday morning in a restaurant on Woodward launching her fifth season. If you want the wider map of who is who in the lyrics, we keep the full Eminem family tree updated.

If you want to go yourself

You will not catch this specific pop-up again, but the building is there every week:

• Mom's Spaghetti, 2131 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48201, inside Union Assembly in The District Detroit. Walk-up window plus the sit-down room.
• The Trailer is upstairs. Merch, retail collection pieces, dead stock, and a rotating memorabilia display. Free to walk through.
• The menu is short on purpose. Spaghetti, spaghetti with meatballs, and the s'ghetti sandwich, which is spaghetti in bread and is exactly as correct as it sounds.
• Eminem is not there. He turns up occasionally and unannounced, which is precisely why you should not plan around it.
• Watch the listings, not the fan accounts. This entire trip happened because of one line in a local weekend roundup, published about eighteen hours before doors.
• If you are coming from Canada, budget for the border. Both crossings cost me time, and the one heading home cost me a lot of it.

On that last point, since it is the part nobody puts in a travel note. Coming back into Canada the next day I was pulled aside and the car was searched end to end, everything out of it, while my nephew and I stood in front of the vehicle and were told to keep our hands out of our pockets. Nothing came of it and nothing was found, because there was nothing to find. It is just a thing that can happen on this drive, and it is easier if you are expecting it than if you are not.

More on the business side of it in our piece on Mom's Spaghetti and Eminem's food empire, and on the rest of the portfolio in Eminem's business empire.

What I actually came away with

Four hours each way, two border crossings and an overnight for a spaghetti restaurant and a podcast launch is, on paper, an absurd allocation of a weekend.

What you get for it is a woman who grew up as the most-referenced person in one of the biggest catalogs in music history, launching season five of a show she makes with her friend from second grade, then eating lunch in a booth like anyone else. A 13-year-old seeing Detroit for the first time. And the episode playing in the car that night, recorded and released in the building I had just left.

Worth the drive. Would do it again on eighteen hours' notice.

Part 2 is coming. The full conversation with Hailie, Brittany and Evan, in their words, is going up as its own piece. Stay tuned, and the rest of my video from the day is on YouTube.

Related reading

• Inside Eminem's STANS documentary: when fandom becomes obsession
• Grandpa Shady: Eminem's Father's Day 2026 with two grandchildren
• Hailie Jade Scott McClintock turns 30
• Eminem's family tree: the people behind the lyrics
• Mom's Spaghetti and Eminem's food empire
• Our early-August 2026 Eminem news recap

Sources

• Daily Detroit, weekend roundup (the pop-up announcement: Mom's Spaghetti, Friday from the 11 a.m. open, fifth season launch, episode dropping that afternoon. its "podcast crew" did not match what I found on the day, as noted above) and The Detroit News, August 13, 2026 (paywalled second report of the same event)
• Apple Podcasts: just a little shady and Spotify: just a little shady (Season 5 Episode 1 title, August 14, 2026 release, 44:58 runtime, Season 4 finale date)
• Wikipedia: Mom's Spaghetti (2017 Union Joints pop-ups, The Shelter, festival run, September 29, 2021 opening, Eminem serving the first ten customers, address, menu)
• Ilitch News Hub (permanent location opening inside Union Assembly in The District Detroit)
• Hypebeast (The Trailer: rotating Eminem memorabilia, retail collection, dead stock, named for B-Rabbit's trailer in 8 Mile)
• Wikipedia: Stans (SXSW London premiere June 2, 2025, AMC run from August 7, Paramount+ August 26, director, producers, Rotten Tomatoes score) and Culture Mix review (the fans are credited by first name only; Brendan, a fan since 2008)
• Billboard on how STANS was made (roughly 9,000 responses to the casting call. This piece puts the number of fans selected at twenty; we have left the figure out of the article because published accounts disagree and Brendan, who is in the film, recalls fewer) and Billboard on the original casting call (the questionnaire, including whether applicants had ever been to Detroit)
• The Detroit News and Rolling Stone (podcast launch in July 2022, Brittany Ednie as longtime co-host and childhood friend)
• The Knot (May 18, 2024 wedding at Greencrest Manor, Battle Creek, Michigan)
• Good Morning America and NME (Elliot Marshall McClintock born March 14, 2025; the E.M.M. initials)
• Wikipedia: "Temporary" (July 12, 2024 album release, October 3, 2024 video, the Grandpa shirt and sonogram reveal)
• Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (37th Annual Induction Ceremony, November 5, 2022, Dr. Dre inducting Eminem)

All photographs and video are my own, shot at Mom's Spaghetti and The Trailer on August 14, 2026. The following are first-hand accounts given to me in conversation rather than documented fact: the manager's fourteen years, Brendan's recollections of grand opening day in September 2021 including where the line formed and his place in it, his fifteen years of travelling to Eminem events, and his Stan #3 billing.

Every externally sourced claim above was independently fact-checked on August 16, 2026 and held up. The one item no published source can settle is the Stan #3 billing, since the credits name the fans by first name only. We run it on Brendan's own confirmation, which is the best source there is: he is the person in the film.